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This chapter offers the first full translation from Russian to English of the Balance of the National Economy of the USSR, 1924–26’s first chapter. Involving 12 authors and composed of 21 chapters, the Balance is a collective work published in June 1926 in Moscow by the Soviet Central Statistical Administration under the scientific supervision of its former director, Pavel Illich Popov (1872–1950). In this first chapter, titled ‘Studying the Balance of the National Economy: An Introduction’, Popov set the theoretical foundations of what might be considered as the first modern national accounting system and paved the way to multisector macroeconometric modelling.

While economists are increasingly acknowledging the importance of distributional issues, the distribution of the consumption of food items has largely been neglected. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that important insights can be obtained by analysing the distribution of consumption of food products within society.

This study was conducted by analysing food consumption in two very different countries: Romania, a middle-income country and Switzerland, one of the most prosperous countries in the world. In order to test the formulated hypotheses, consumption per capita was calculated, as a base for the calculation of the Gini coefficient of consumption for each product. A mixed effect model was applied for total food and for meat, computing the predictors for the variable “consumption distribution”.

Using the Gini coefficients of food and drink item consumption by Romanian and Swiss households, the authors tested the hypothesis that in prosperous middle-income countries the homogeneity of food consumption is growing over time as a sign of consumption democratisation, whereas in high-income countries a growing degree of individualisation is leading to decreasing homogeneity. For meat, the bifurcation of consumption patterns between vegetarians and hedonists leads to a growing Gini coefficient over time for both countries. The analysis controls for factors such as the products’ importance in the diet and their price.

The paper approaches a new subject and raises a new research question that may be relevant for structural issues of contemporary society. Both the comparative analysis of food distribution in two different societies and their dynamics is a novelty.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the changes in wealth and consumption inequality in Spain and estimate the consumption effects of housing and financial wealth.

The estimations are made using micro-data from the Spanish Survey of Household Finances (2002–2014) applying cross-section, panel and interquartile techniques.

The findings of this paper suggest that there was an increase in wealth inequality during the period under analysis and a reduction in consumption inequality. Also, the authors find a significant positive effect of wealth on consumer expenditure. Disaggregating by asset type, the value of the main residence is the category with the highest estimated effect on consumption, whereas the remaining types of assets, although still positive and generally significant, have more modest effects on consumption. However, the estimated coefficients and their significance can change substantially depending on the phase of the economic cycle and the position of the household in the income distribution.

These results provide new empirical evidence on the effects of household wealth changes on their consumption behavior, the differences depending on the household's position in the distribution and the fluctuations of these estimated coefficients throughout a period of profound economic upheavals.

Wellbeing evaluation using ordered categorical response data is hazardous given the scale dependent nature of most measures of wellbeing and inequality. Here, scale independent instruments for measuring levels of wellbeing and inequalities between groups in multidimensional ordered categorical environments are introduced and applied in a study of health and consumption wellbeing and the aging process in twenty‐first century China. Urban/rural location, gender, age and the availability of welfare support were considered circumstances in what is in essence a study of equality of opportunity in the acquisition of health and consumption wellbeing in Chinas’ aging population. Older populations are found to experience diminished and increasingly diverse wellbeing outcomes that are, to some extent, ameliorated by welfare support.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate whether consumers’ use of music via streaming service benefits niche products and diversified consumption of music. It examines does winner take all or is long tail achieved in the digital music market.

To investigate the degree of concentration in the digital music sales, this study measures multiple concentration metrics using the top 100 songs for 245 weeks listed on the Korean music ranking chart.

Conflicting results are found between the analyses based on short-run and long-run data. When sales distributions are compared weekly or monthly, the results show that streaming services have a less concentrated sales distribution than download services. However, the result becomes the opposite in the long-run analysis (i.e. one year).

This study proposes that the non-technological drivers such as the beneficial addiction of music consumption can be a crucial driver affecting the usage concentration in music industry, coupled with the royalty policy of access-based services.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.

To date, many environmental policy discussions consider inequalities between groups (typically by comparing the average or aggregate resource use of one group to another group), but most ignore disproportionalities within groups. Disproportionality, as discussed in a small but growing body of work, refers to resource use that is highly unequal among members of the same group, and is characterized by a positively skewed distribution, where a small number of resource users create far more environmental harm than “typical” group members. Focusing on aggregated or average impacts effectively treats all members of a group as interchangeable, missing the few “outliers” that actually tend to be responsible for a large fraction of overall resource use. This chapter offers reasons why we should or should not expect disproportional production of environmental impacts (from both mathematical and sociological perspectives), looks at empirical evidence of disproportionality, and offers a framework for detecting disproportionality and assessing just how much difference the outliers make. I find that in cases where the within-group distribution of resource use is highly disproportionate (characterized by extreme outliers), targeting reduction efforts at the disproportionate polluters can offer opportunities to decrease environmental degradation substantially, at a relatively low cost.

We examine the relationship between the business cycle and poverty for the period from 1960 to 2008 using income data from the Current Population Survey and consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This new evidence on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and poverty is of particular interest, given recent changes in antipoverty policies that have placed greater emphasis on participation in the labor market and in-kind transfers. We look beyond official poverty, examining alternative income poverty and consumption poverty, which have conceptual and empirical advantages as measures of the well-being of the poor. We find that both income and consumption poverty are sensitive to macroeconomic conditions. A 1 percentage point increase in unemployment is associated with an increase in the after-tax income poverty rate of 0.9–1.1 percentage points in the long run, and an increase in the consumption poverty rate of 0.3–1.2 percentage points in the long run. The evidence on whether income is more responsive to the business cycle than consumption is mixed. Income poverty does appear to be more responsive using national level variation, but consumption poverty is often more responsive to unemployment when using regional variation. Low percentiles of both income and consumption are sensitive to macroeconomic conditions, and in most cases, low percentiles of income appear to be more responsive than low percentiles of consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate India's five year plan strategies for including the deprived in the development process since Independence.

This is a policy review paper based on past studies.

The paper argues that effective policy formulation for inclusion and its evaluation is conditioned by the available institutional capacity to generate and effectively utilize a sound information base. Using empirical illustrations based on past studies, this paper shows that India's pursuit of inclusion has been hampered because of the limited appreciation of design as well as limitations in available information. This has led to a mechanical pursuit of sophistication in policy formulation, which has rendered both the implementation and an honest evaluation of the policy process difficult.

This paper has relevance for inclusive policy reforms and will open up a debate, as well as future research, on the issues raised.

To determine the domestic flushing water consumption for a building development.

A statistic mathematical model is proposed and the model parameters are sampled with the Monte Carlo sampling technique. The frequency distribution of the parameters for Hong Kong is identified from the survey results of the water closet usage patterns in five typical residential building estates. In particular, the density function of the diurnal variations of occupant load and flushes per occupant, and the cistern volume of the water closets in 597 apartments are used to establish the model.

The flushing water consumption of the residential developments in Hong Kong is determined and compared with the measurement result of typical residential buildings.

The model parameters are not exhaustive and are determined from surveys in Hong Kong, which perhaps limits the model's usefulness elsewhere.

A useful source of reference in determining the domestic flushing water consumption of building developments for those involved in building design and management related to the flushing water systems of residential buildings.

This paper proposes a statistical mathematical model of domestic flushing water consumption and presents a template to determine the required model parameters. The model offers practical help to professionals involved in planning, designing and managing the flushing water facilities for domestic buildings.